The Day’s of his Lives Scene 77

Gino was looking very, very bad. Premature aging had caused his face to wrinkle up like an old man’s and liver spots covered the skin on his hands. He had lost an incredible amount of weight in the last few months and his skin hung on his once magnificent shoulders like an old jacket draped loosely over a kitchen chair. The doctors had given us no hope. Unless there was a miracle, he’d be dead within a month. I was frantic from worry. We had stopped going to the bars months ago when he had started feeling bad. Our friends stopped coming by after seeing how bad he looked. The prospect of being prematurely aged by an unknown metabolic disease terrified them. AIDS they understood, but there was something horrifying about seeing a handsome man of twenty-five being turned into a doddering old wreck in a matter of weeks. Gino lay in his bed shivering with the cold of approaching death as I sat by his side and held his hand.